World View and the Worldview Assessment Instrument (WAI)

“New and improved technologies may enhance the 21st Century commander’s ability to communicate with coalition partners, but coalition efforts may still founder on the shoals of technical incompatibilities, language difficulties, cultural assymetrics, and ignorance of key historical and geopolitical issues.” R.H Scales, 2001

If proven true, WAI might be very relevant to Command and Control (C2) environments which are often characterized as “teams of teams”.

What are worldviews?

Worldviews are sets of assumptions about life and the physical and social worlds. The ‘lens’ through which one perceives reality. The central insight of Worldview is that personal and cultural assumptions about reality have profound effects upon thought and behavior. The WAI (Koltko-Rivera, 2004) has 6 Core Dimensions, and is designed to assess crucial aspects of worldview.

What have we done?

Comparison of the results across demographic characteristics (i.e., gender, age, strength of religious believe, military service background and domain, and workplace)

Comparison of the results to the American sample reported by Koltko-Rivera

Summary of findings

The results reflect differences between American and Israeli samples, as well as differences among the Israeli participants. Some of these differences (e.g., relation to group) were related to the type of military service that participants had experienced. Thus, worldview or its components can possible contribute to the understanding of team performance in applied settings.

Differences within Israeli sample

Ontology – Females were significantly more spiritual than males

Relation to group – Those who served in combat roles in the IDF were more collectivists than those who served in field jobs or administrative ones

Relation to authority – Females were significantly more lateral than males

Differences between American and Israeli samples

There were items in the American WAI that did not load to any factor in the Israeli one. Therefore some changes were required to be made in order to generate the Israeli scoring.

Specific differences by dimensions:

Ontology – Israeli sample more neutral, US sample more spiritual

Responsibility – Both samples are internal but the Israeli sample is more skewed

Agency – Both samples are voluntarists

Relation to group – Both samples lean toward individualism

Relation to authority – Israeli sample more neutral, US sample more lateral